Michael Podhorzer

@mikepod.bsky.social

121161 Followers 308 Following

Former political director, AFL-CIO. Senior fellow, CAP. My Substack: www.weekendreading.net

Black representation in the US House, Confederacy vs. rest of the US: chart showing a brief surge during Reconstruction, then almost none during Jim Crow, then a big surge after the VRA (mostly in the rest of the US, not the Confederacy), then a big surge all over the US, especially the Confederacy. Only in the last 10 years has Black representation in the House grown to about the same proportion as the US black population.
Black representation in the US House, Confederacy vs. rest of the US: chart showing a brief surge during Reconstruction, then almost none during Jim Crow, then a big surge after the VRA (mostly in the rest of the US, not the Confederacy), then a big surge all over the US, especially the Confederacy. Only in the last 10 years has Black representation in the House grown to about the same proportion as the US black population.
Civil rights leaders murdered seeking the right to vote, starting top left: Martin Luther King, Jr., Medgar Evers, Cpl. Roman Ducksworth Jr., Dr. Thomas Hency Brewer, Henry Hezekiah Dee, Charles Moore, Herbert Lee, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, Jimmie Lee Jackson, Johnnie Mae Chappell, Jonathan Daniels, Lamar Smith, Louis Allen, Lt. Col. Lemuel Penn, Rev. Bruce Klunder, Sammy Younge Jr., Vernon Dahmer, Rev. George Lee, Viola Gregg Liuzzo, Rev. James Reed, William Lewis Moore, and Willie Brewster.
Justice Antonin Scalia: The Voting Rights Act is a Racial Entitlement. "Now, I don't think that's attributable to the fact that it is so much clearer now that we need this. I think it is attributable, very likely attributable, to a phenomenon that is called perpetuation of racial entitlement. It's been written about. Whenever a society adopts racial entitlements, it is very difficult to get out of them through the normal political processes." -Antonin Scalia, 2013, Shelby County
Civil rights leaders murdered seeking the right to vote, starting top left: Martin Luther King, Jr., Medgar Evers, Cpl. Roman Ducksworth Jr., Dr. Thomas Hency Brewer, Henry Hezekiah Dee, Charles Moore, Herbert Lee, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, Jimmie Lee Jackson, Johnnie Mae Chappell, Jonathan Daniels, Lamar Smith, Louis Allen, Lt. Col. Lemuel Penn, Rev. Bruce Klunder, Sammy Younge Jr., Vernon Dahmer, Rev. George Lee, Viola Gregg Liuzzo, Rev. James Reed, William Lewis Moore, and Willie Brewster.
There have been two long marches to Reconstruction in American history. The first Reconstruction was codified in the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, and the second Reconstruction was codified in the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, both of which immediately and dramatically broke down the barriers to Black political participation. There have also been two swift, brutal regional backlashes to those long marches, when both judicial and extrajudicial actors stoked the infernal wildfires of white grievance. And both of those were followed by national “redemptions,” where many elements of the regional “redemptions” were extended to the nation by supportive presidents—first Woodrow Wilson, and now Donald Trump. Furthermore, Wilson and Trump both made aggressive use of the federal government to stifle dissent broadly, including deportation. That history is well told in books like American Midnight, which chronicles the earlier attacks by the Justice Department on domestic dissent (Palmer Raids) and aggressive deportations.
Headline: "South Korean Ex-Leader Is Sentenced to Life in Prison"
Pictures of murdered activists: Andrew Goodman, James Earl Chaney, and Michael Henry Schwerner in 1964; Renee Good and Alex Pretti today.
"Unions have the internal support, structure and organizing capacity to support the fight against Mr. Trump. Yet no one in the labor movement has taken the public role of countering Mr. O’Brien and making it clear to the American public that most unions are strongly opposed to Mr. Trump."
Change elections since 1960: 9 of the last 10, compared to only 8 in the decades before that.
Trump's approval with voters is underwater by 10-ish points, depending on the survey, compared to 30-ish points with nonvoters.
A video showing the timeline of Selma, the Voting Rights Act's passage and reauthorization, and its dismantling by the Roberts Court, followed by portraits of murdered civil rights leaders with audio of Scalia saying: "Now, I don't think that's [the VRA's bipartisan reauthorization is] attributable to the fact that it is so much clearer now that we need this. I think it is attributable, very likely attributable, to a phenomenon that is called perpetuation of racial entitlement. It's been written about. Whenever a society adopts racial entitlements, it is very difficult to get out of them through the normal political processes."
Left: "The white men were roused by a mere instinct of self-preservation ... until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the South, to protect the Southern country." -Woodrow Wilson Right: Trump, holding a framed copy of his full-page newspaper ad calling for New York’s death penalty to be reinstated for the five Black and Latino teens wrongly accused of a murder in Central Park. Trump refused to back down, even after the young men were exonerated.
Chart: "Unified State Control." Showing partisan control of state governments in the South from the Jim Crow Era (1932-1968), to the Voting Rights Era (1968-2008), to the MAGA Era (today). Both the Jim Crow Era and the MAGA Era are nearly solid blue/red, respectively, while the VRA Era is much more balanced.
Left: KKK members posing in front of a burning cross. Right: Neo-Nazi protesters with tiki torches (one doing a Hitler salute) in Charlottesville, 2017.
Left: Members of the first South Carolina legislature after the Civil War. Approximately 2,000 Black men were elected to office during the post-war Reconstruction period. Right: Black senators from American history, including Barack Obama and Kamala Harris
Side-by-side of Frederick Douglass ("If there is no struggle, there is no progress") and Martin Luther King, Jr. at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom
In his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King wrote: "Legal but not Legitimate." Picture of MLK. "We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was ‘legal’ and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was ‘illegal.’" Martin Luther King, Letter from a Birmingham Jail
Popular Constitutionalism. Picture of Frederick Douglass. "Now, take the Constitution according to its plain reading, and I defy the presentation of a single pro-slavery clause in it." (1) “Interpreted as it ought to be interpreted, the Constitution is a glorious liberty document.” (1) “TheConstitution’s language is ‘we the people’ not we the white people, not we the privileged class, not we the high, not we the low, but we the people; not we the horses, sheep, and swine, and wheelbarrows, but we the people, we the human inhabitants.” (2) “I,on the other hand, deny that the Constitution guarantees the right to hold property in man.” (2) (1) - “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” delivered on July 5, 1852 (2) - “The Constitution of the United States: Is It Pro-Slavery or Anti-Slavery?” delivered on March 26, 1860, in Glasgow, Scotland
Chart: unions alone gain voter confidence
Chart: unions alone gain voter confidence (net approval changes from 2009)
Graph: The Receptivity Margin: Opposing Voters Who Don't Disapprove. Trump lowest by far.
graph: Presidential Disapproval. Trump 1 and 2 highest by far.
Murdered civil rights leaders, starting top left: Martin Luther King, Jr., Medgar Evers, Cpl. Roman Ducksworth Jr., Dr. Thomas Hency Brewer, Henry Hezekiah Dee, Charles Moore, Herbert Lee, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, Jimmie Lee Jackson, Johnnie Mae Chappell, Jonathan Daniels, Lamar Smith, Louis Allen, Lt. Col. Lemuel Penn, Rev. Bruce Klunder, Sammy Younge Jr., Vernon Dahmer, Rev. George Lee, Viola Gregg Liuzzo, Rev. James Reed, William Lewis Moore, and Willie Brewster.
“The candid citizen must confess that if the policy of the Government upon the vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by the decisions of the Supreme Court . . . the people will have ceased to be their own rulers.” – Abraham Lincoln, 1861
All of the Warren Court’s major election related decisions had at least six bipartisan votes, and nearly all had at least seven (blue). On the other hand, nearly all of the Roberts Court’s major election related decisions were by 5-4 along partisan lines (red). And there were nearly twice as many of them.
From 1930 on, the average percentage of senators voting to confirm the justices on the Supreme Court was over 90%. Then came the Federalist Society nominations, plunging that number to 60% and below.
The Roberts Court is a purposeful project to do by judicial fiat what could never be done by any other available democratic process; The plutocrats behind the Federalist Society spent billions to pack the Court with justices who would selectively take up “cases” designed to make pro-plutocrat rulings like Citizens United and Loper Bright. By contrast, the NAACP did not spend billions of dollars to pack the Court with pro-civil rights justices who decided Brown v. Board, nor did indigent prisoners spend billions of dollars to pack the Court with pro-defendant justices who decided Gideon, nor did feminists spend billions of dollars to pack the Court with justices favorable to abortion rights who decided Roe v. Wade. Unlike the Courts before it, the revanchist coalition behind the Roberts Court captured the Senate as well, necessary to (1) eschew bipartisanship in ramming through unpopular nominees (more below); (2) defy norms by denying Obama his nominee before ramming through Trump’s; and (3) reliably filibuster every attempt by Congress to respond to the Court’s rulings, removing an important check that was frequently used throughout American history.) A single interest group, the Federalist Society, has had veto power over every Republican president’s Supreme Court nominees since George W. Bush’s failed nomination of Harriet Miers. Unlike previous courts that sought consensus and made concessions to present a united front for significant or controversial rulings to maximize public credibility, the Roberts Court pursued maximalist outcomes with no concessions along partisan lines. (More below.) The Roberts Court is the only Court in American history consisting of justices confirmed by Senators representing less than half of the United States population or a majority of justices appointed by presidents who lost the popular vote. (More below.)
A chart showing that every time he has faced a grand jury, Trump has been indicted; every time he has faced a trial jury, Trump has been found guilty; every time his cases have come before judges he didn’t appoint, including those appointed by previous Republican presidents, Trump has lost; whenever surveys have asked, a majority of Americans say Trump has committed crimes—but every time he has come before the justices and judges he appointed, Trump has had his way.
A doom loop for democracy: A diagram showing a cycle with the following steps: Pack SCOTUS and Federal Courts; Empower Plutocrats, Theocrats; Purge RINOs; Redraw Lines; Eliminate 2-Party Competition